Watch your Language: The Hidden Power of Words in the Workplace

Language is important; it’s how we manifest our deeply held beliefs. There are myriad examples of power dynamics embedded in the modern organizational lexicon.

The roots of management: managing or controlling?

As business professor Ronald Purser observes, the word “manage” originates from the French word manège, which describes horse handling and training, and manier, to handle. To further highlight this provocative etymology, the Italian word maneggiare refers to the handling of a tool or the training of a horse.

To “manage” is to have power over others. Modern organizational management is the apotheosis of the feudal system with separate classes, centralization of power, and designated overlords. To pretend otherwise is to ignore reality.

Visier CEO Ryan Wong recently shared the results of a survey of 1,000 full-time employees across the U.S., revealing that only about 38% of non-managerial employees are interested in becoming a people manager at their current company. Apparently, workers are no longer into being handled like horses—or handling others. Given the ubiquity and apparent permanence of hybrid and remote work, it’s worth asking: if a corporate ladder falls in an office and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Human Resources: outdated terminology hurting company culture

We should also question the term “Human Resources” (HR). In the 1980s, organizations replaced the old concept of a “personnel department” with the new, improved concept of a “human resources department”. Management saw the term “personnel” as overly supportive of workers in the brave new world of reengineering and its attendant mass layoffs.

As journalist Cliff Weathers noted, new efficiency technologies called for a new generation of panopticonic overseers aligned with management to keep workers (resources) on track. HR’s convenient alignment with the power dynamics of horse handling were, in hindsight, unsurprising.

A pencil is a resource. A forklift is a resource. A parking lot is a resource. A laptop computer is a resource. People aren’t resources. Henry Mintzberg said it best: “A resource is a thing. I am a human being. I am not a human resource.” Most humans seem to agree.

The role of pronouns in leadership

Pronouns are a rich source of information about the power structure of an enterprise. If you listen carefully to leaders describe their organizations, you can learn a great deal about how they view people.

Author James W. Pennebaker writes in The Secret Life of Pronouns: “Stop for a minute and think about your last conversation, e-mail or text message. You think you said something about dinner plans, your laundry or a strategy for the next sales meeting. And you probably did. But you also said much, much more. The precise words you used to communicate your message revealed more about you than you can imagine.”

Possessive pronouns in the workplace include our people, my people, your people, his people, her people, and their people. Since people can’t legally belong to other people, perhaps we should reserve possessive pronouns for the things that people possess?

The illusion of empowerment

The concept of “empowerment” also warrants scrutiny, where a yawning gap separates rhetoric and reality. While empowerment themes permeated management literature and rhetoric in the 1990s and beyond, the term “empowerment” is usually ill-defined.

Empowerment programs generally involve someone with power lending their power to a subordinate. The problem with empowerment is that anything loaned can be repossessed. For example, if Susie in HR doesn’t do a good job setting up a new empowerment program (in the view of the “empowerer”) the boss can yank back control at any time. People either have the power to do certain things or they don’t. Revocable empowerment is an oxymoron.

Empowerment is a classic tool for creating a Potemkin Village of inclusive workplaces while maintaining authoritative command and control.

Redefining work relationships: employees vs. associates

It seems that virtually every HR book, article, and post refers to employees, employers, and employment. Dictionary.com defines employee as “a person working for another person or business firm for pay”.

In an era of talent wars, when robot managers are now giving orders to humans, that definition doesn’t feel particularly motivating. Not coincidentally, this usage sprang up in the mid-1800s, right around the advent of the Industrial Age, when employers needed an abundance of strong backs to do the work.

Much of American labor jurisprudence, for example, reflects this glaring dichotomy between “superiors” and “inferiors.” The legal doctrine of respondeat superior is derived from the common law of masters and servants. If truth in advertising laws required job descriptions to describe those jobs as servanthood, it’s doubtful that Gen Z would be excited to answer the call. The digital natives of the rising generation will require deep connections to colleagues, the freedom to create, a sense of meaning, opportunity for learning, and the space to make an impact. Bossism, however benevolently imposed, is not a sustainable business model for the workplace of the future.

Some thoughtful organizations have adopted terms like Associate (W.L. Gore) and Colleague (Morning Star), which convey a professional work culture that values individuals. My favorite AI tool came up with ten alternatives in five seconds. Surely organizational leaders can find better language than “employees” and start using it.

Other dehumanizing HR terms we can do without include direct reports, which reinforces the artificial divide between workers and bosses; man-hours, which assumes that women aren’t part of the workplace; and headcount, which reduces people to disembodied heads. The wearying list goes on.

Self-management: moving toward a human-centered workplace

How can we move forward into a better future of work when our outdated language reinforces the permanent asymmetry of power?

First, we can start with the word “management” itself. By adding the prefix self- to management whenever possible, we begin to detoxify the horse-handling negativity of traditional management and bring it into a human context. Management should ultimately be self-management, where individuals handle themselves in collaboration with others to create value for the world.

Second, replace the concept of managing people (i.e., horse handling) with resource stewardship and team collaboration. True stewardship involves the care of physical resources, financial resources, time, relationships, and the search for meaning. True stewardship is about solving problems together, meeting human needs, and creating more value than one destroys (also known as making a profit).

Third, recognize the dignity and voice of every human being in the workplace. As my dear friend Peter Koestenbaum writes, we should teach leadership to everyone and bake leadership into every product and service that we create and sell.

It all starts with language, which is how mindsets are molded. The time to break the language mold is now. Future generations will judge how well we succeeded.